An online acquaintance and I have been hashing out details about websites. She’s got a lot of knowledge. I often write her with questions, which she always answers, and in her answer I usually want to dig deeper. Such was the case when I told her I was going with a host that allowed X (amount of accounts) for Y (price). She asked how much space that allowed. Good guestion. So I started researching that on the net. Man, did I learn a lot or what.
Now, I knew about bits and bytes and all that, but the review I got really drove it home. I learned about how many bytes a page takes up, with and without graphics. I found a calculator here , which was fun to play with. I could visit a site, right-click, click properties and learn the size of the page. By entering that size into the calculator, I could get an idea of how many bytes would be taken from Z (total disk space). I’ve known for a long time not to code large graphics into a webpage because that affects load time, and apparently, a lot of people may still be on dial up. I learned how many bytes are in a pixel. I know now to consider screen resolution size regardless of speed. If I throw a large graphic onto a page, some users may not see it all on the screen – they may have to scroll horizontally or vertically. I came to realize that if I want to put graphics, videos, fancy fonts, lots of links, etc. that it all could take a big ole’ byte out of Z.
Considering that “they” (you know “they” — the ones who always whisper what is or what isn’t in your ear) say that the average site visitor needs to see what’s going on within the first 3 seconds (I could be wrong on that figure) to keep their interest, using proper code and sizing graphics properly could make all the difference. I mean, how many times have you left a site because it took too long to load?
Ah…have I stumbled onto ‘website optimization?’ Is this what I’m talking about? Hmmm…well, I don’t know enough yet, but I feel like I’m on the verge of a getting the gist of the thing. Interesting stuff and one more thing I have to consider as I labor to get web pages done. Well, if I take it all seriously, maybe I can create sites that don’t byte, which in turn could byte me in the you-know-where, and that would suck.
Ok, enough.
